Unquiet Flows the Don

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

Wadham College, which Bowra led from 1938 until 1970 and elevated from a long tradition of mediocrity into one of glittering prominence, commissioned this biography by Leslie Mitchell, an "old boy" of Wadham and a historian of modern England and France. Mitchell knew his subject personally, and he has had access to the archives of many of the notable figures with whom Bowra was in contact. He has a deep sympathy for the contradictions and the anxieties that drove Bowra to almost frenetic activity in Oxford, but unfortunately he has no comprehension of ancient Greek culture or the world of classical scholars, whose rejection drove Bowra into university administration in the first place and then consigned his publications to the trash heap soon after his death. Once he was dead, the verbal assaults that Bowra hurled at his detractors came no more.

Bowra’s incandescent talk was admired wherever he went, and he never failed to deliver. In commemorating him for The Times, Isaiah Berlin wrote that "his wit was verbal and cumulative: the words came in short, sharp bursts of precisely aimed, concentrated fire, as image, pun, metaphor, parody, seemed spontaneously to generate one another in a succession of marvelously imagined patterns, sometimes rising to high, wildly comical fantasy." Anyone who has ever listened to Berlin himself cannot but think that he is describing his own way of talking, and yet the description of Bowra’s wit is right on target. Bowra and Berlin were old friends, and the peculiarly dazzling logorrhea that characterized both of them doubtless arose from decades of conversation together.

Bowra was born in 1898 in China, where his father worked in the Chinese customs service, but he soon came back to England and was given an impeccable classical education at Cheltenham. Although his exotic origins may have encouraged a lifelong interest in foreign literatures, Bowra was irreproachably British in background and manner, and for someone like Isaiah Berlin, born of a Jewish family in Riga and arriving in Oxford by way of St. Petersburg, he must have provided a seductive model of sophistication. Berlin saw Bowra as "a major liberating influence," and many years later, in a letter in the summer of 1952, he poured out his gratitude to the warden of Wadham with perhaps excessive self-deprecation: "As you know, I take a low view of myself and all I do and friendship means more to me--and always has--than anything else at all....It is not merely love and admiration for you that I feel, though these emotions are genuine enough; but I owe you a transformation of my entire mode of life and attitude towards it. It is a trite way of putting it perhaps, but you did ‘liberate’ me.... I do not for a moment suppose that you were aware of the strength and emancipating power of your mere presence, but if I am anything to anybody the … responsibility is largely yours." (The full text of this letter has now been published in Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, the delightful second volume of Berlin’s correspondence, skillfully edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes.) Even John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls College, whom Bowra often annoyed mightily, wrote affectingly in verse: "You made us what we are;/Our jokes, our joys, our hopes, our hatreds too,/The outrageous things we do, or want to do--/How much of all of them we owe to you!" The liberating force of Bowra must have been real, although I never felt it myself on the few occasions when I met him towards the end of his life.

For anyone bright enough to respond to the challenges of Bowra’s manner, he was clearly charismatic, and in the 1920s and early 1930s he surrounded himself with young admirers, who always ran the risk of banishment from the charmed circle. Among his undergraduate guests were Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Hugh Gaitskill, Evelyn Waugh, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Both Isaiah Berlin and John Sparrow survived and profited from this quite literally intoxicating society. Mitchell reveals very clearly that the pied-piper aspect of Bowra itself sprang from deep fears of rejection and failure, and he tells, as Berlin himself did at the memorial service in 1971, that H.W.B. Joseph, a demanding philosopher to whom the young Bowra was assigned for tutorials at New College, nearly destroyed his pupil’s confidence by constantly challenging and mocking his assertions. It was only by dropping philosophy at this stage that Bowra managed to recover his equilibrium and go on to a successful undergraduate career in classics. But the sense of inadequacy and failure never left him--and in a notorious episode in 1936, it changed the entire course of his life.

Gilbert Murray, whose name among English-speakers was synonymous with Greek literature in the early twentieth century, was about to retire from the Regius Professorship of Greek at Oxford. He had taught the young Bowra and apparently led him to believe that he might well become his successor in the distinguished post. But to the surprise of almost everyone, Bowra himself above all, the electors to the chair chose E.R. Dodds, an Irish scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy. This was someone completely outside the circle of Oxford academics in which Bowra had already found a niche, and his friends could only assume that Murray had dropped his support of Bowra. The outcome of the election was devastating. Bowra promptly went off to be a visiting professor in America, where he was offered a chair at Harvard. But, Oxonian to the core, he returned and decided instead to accept the wardenship of Wadham as a new vocation in the absence of a chair of Greek.